That VICE Corbyn film: beware your friends in the media – especially if you are paranoid and incompetent

Critics of Jeremy Corbyn have understandably leapt upon the evidence of the VICE News fly-on-the-wall film about the Labour leader as providing yet more evidence of his team’s internal divisions and incompetence. But people have missed that this is also an adroit piece of documentary-making that uses VICE’s stylistic informality to give us some very effective political journalism.

Did Britain’s right-wing newspapers win the election for the Tories? Guest Blog

This article by LSE Media and Communications’ Dr Bart Cammaerts who researches and teaches political communication.
The day after the unexpected defeat of the Labour leader Neil Kinnock in the 1992 election, the Murdoch-owned tabloid The Sun’s infamous headline read: ‘It’s The Sun wot won it’. During the 1992 campaign it seemed as if the Tories would lose and Labour […]

This election will be complex, simple, social. So how do we cover it? Polis Conference preview #Polis2015

This year’s UK election is going to be one of the hardest elections to report for decades, and yet for some journalists it could also be the easiest. Either way, it’s going to be a fascinating story to cover. The BBC has published its guidance for coverage of the campaign which reflects in some detail how complicated it could […]

Has Parliament completely lost its role as the national debating chamber? And did opening it up to broadcast media hasten the decline? Apart from the Queen’s Speech, the Budget, PMQs, occasional set-piece such debates about going to war, and celebrity appearances before Select Committees, the House of Commons (let alone the Lords) is barely covered by mainstream newspapers or broadcast […]

This article by Polis intern Eryk Salvaggio In a telling scene from Mike Chinoy’s documentary, “Assignment China: The Week that Changed the World,” an oral history of Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to the PRC, American Journalist Ted Koppel describes Nixon’s first view of Great Wall.Along the wall were families on blankets, listening to radios, snapping pictures, and doing all […]